Pricing in SFTP Gateway
TLDR - Quick Summary
What: How SFTP Gateway is priced on Azure — a license from Thorn Technologies (BYOL, recommended) or an hourly marketplace plan
BYOL license (annual, per license): Standard $999 (up to 10 users), Professional $2,999 (up to 100 users), Enterprise — contact us (1,000+ users)
Marketplace pay-as-you-go: Standard from $0.08/hr (5 users), Professional $0.15/hr (100 users, Long-Term Support), Enterprise $0.40/hr; software charge on top of the VM
Free trial: 30 days from the web admin on a BYOL deployment, no license key required
Stop charges: Stop (de-allocate) or delete the VM in the Azure portal
Overview
There are two ways to pay for SFTP Gateway on Azure:
- SFTP Gateway (BYOL) — the recommended way to get started. The marketplace listing shows Bring your own license: your Azure invoice only ever shows the VM, disk and storage costs. You license the software directly from Thorn Technologies, after a free 30-day trial.
- Marketplace pay-as-you-go listings (Standard, Professional, Enterprise) — the license is baked into the listing and Azure bills an hourly software charge on top of the VM. The Professional listing is in Long-Term Support and is being retired; see Professional vs BYOL.
Both run the same software. For a feature-by-feature comparison of the tiers, see Product Plan Tiers.
SFTP Gateway (BYOL) — license pricing
Deploy the SFTP Gateway (BYOL) listing, then start the 30-day free trial from the web admin interface. When the trial ends, purchase the license tier that matches your user count:
| License | Users | Price | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | up to 10 SFTP users | $999 per year, per license | Development, testing and small or non-critical workloads |
| Professional | up to 100 SFTP users | $2,999 per year, per license | Production environments that need high availability and reliable performance |
| Enterprise | 1,000+ SFTP users | Contact us | Large deployments with advanced requirements and dedicated, SLA-backed support |
Prices are in USD and are billed annually per license. Licenses are purchased per VM instance: set the quantity at checkout to the number of SFTP Gateway instances you run. The same license works on Azure, AWS, Google Cloud and the container, so you can move clouds without buying again.
To purchase or to size a larger deployment, book a call with our Sales team or email sales@thorntech.com. The step-by-step checkout is in Purchasing a License. Current prices are always on thorntech.com/sftp-gateway.
Marketplace pay-as-you-go pricing
The pay-as-you-go listings charge for every hour the VM runs, whether or not it is transferring files. This is a software charge on top of the cost of the VM.
SFTP Gateway Standard
SFTP Gateway Standard supports up to 5 SFTP users and starts at $0.08 USD per hour:
- USD
0.08/hour (USD 58.40/month) for instances with 1-2 vCPU(s). - USD
0.09/hour (USD 65.70/month) for instances with 4 or more vCPUs.
You can run SFTP Gateway Standard on a Standard_B1ms (1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM) instance or better,
which costs about 0.02/hour.
SFTP Gateway Professional (Long-Term Support)
SFTP Gateway Professional supports up to 100 SFTP users at a flat rate of $0.15 per hour.
In a production environment you might run this on a single Standard_D2s_v3 (2 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM),
which costs about 0.096/hour.
The Professional listing receives critical security patches only and reaches End of Maintenance in June 2027 and End of Life in June 2028. New deployments should use BYOL, and existing Professional deployments can migrate by following Professional vs BYOL.
SFTP Gateway Enterprise
SFTP Gateway Enterprise is a flat rate of $0.40 per hour. Enterprise is intended for large
enterprises with custom development and integration needs. Contact us at
sales@thorntech.com so we can learn more about your requirements
and write a custom proposal for your use case.
Cost optimization on the pay-as-you-go listings
All pay-as-you-go plans come with a 1-month free trial, and reservation pricing saves money if you know the VM will run around the clock:
- 1 year: 9% savings
- 3 years: 14% savings
A BYOL license is the simpler way to get a fixed yearly cost.
How to stop being charged
To stop being charged for a pay-as-you-go listing, stop (de-allocate) or delete the VM in the Azure portal. De-allocating the VM also stops the metering for the underlying infrastructure. A BYOL deployment has no software charge to stop; the license simply expires at the end of its term.